The Justice of Israel

by Benny Katz

As a social activist who grew up emulating Che Guevara and Dr. Martin Luther King, many longtime comrades are astounded by my recent advocacy on behalf of the Israeli right. On a superficial level, it may appear that I have abandoned the values of human justice and forfeited my liberal credentials. But in truth, I still adhere to the very same principles that have impelled me to fight on behalf of so many campaigns over the years associated with the radical left. Despite the dubious picture of the Middle East that the world media presents, my conversion to Zionism is not a rejection but an embrace of the values I have stood for all of my life. My Zionism is a revolutionary Zionism based on human rights, social justice, and collective responsibility.

Unlike their portrayal in the mainstream media, the advocates of “Greater Israel” are not the Jewish equivalent to America’s Christian right or Europe’s Neo-Nazis. They are by and large not religious fanatics seeking to aggravate an already difficult political situation. In truth, they are patriots willing to struggle for their right to live securely in their own country – a right enjoyed today by most nations throughout the world. The true choice before the people of Israel is not between war and peace as the media would have us believe. Rather it is a choice between existence and annihilation for the Jewish state – between national defense and submission to those seeking Israel’s destruction. There are Israeli citizens today anxiously wondering if their country will exist in ten years time. Even more alarming are world-renowned journalists smugly predicting Israel’s demise as if it were a probable forecast that the international community should advance.

I find it deplorable that the human race can arrive at this frightening situation only six decades after the Nazis brutally extinguished the Jews of Europe. Any honest and open-minded person can see that the current Arab goal is not two states coexisting side by side but the complete elimination of Israel from the map. And the world gradually bestows increasing legitimacy on this agenda as the Jewish state is pressured into compromises, good will gestures, and land concessions.

But justice should not depend on the intensions of any one person or group. Justice must be grounded on historical facts, intellectual honesty, and moral integrity. Even if the Arabs between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River were to genuinely seek peace with Israel, the disputed territories would still rightfully belong to the Jewish people. And standing on moral principle means fighting for what is right and not merely for what is temporarily in vogue. The ancient Hebrew nation has a right to its own country and, like all other nations, Israel is entitled to self-determination on its native soil. There are twenty one countries currently presiding as members of the Arab League (not counting Iran and other non-Arab Muslim states), most of which are much larger than the single Jewish state. If the Arab world were willing to live in harmony with Israel, the Jews would certainly pursue peace. But why should even that require Israel to relinquish sovereignty over her borders? When a person honestly examines the history of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, he understands that there is no valid reason why Israel should surrender the heart of its ancestral homeland to appease anyone, especially genocidal extremists with no intention of allowing a Jewish state to exist.

In truth, the Arab people have no historic, moral, or legal claim to the Land of Israel. Although the country was ruled for many centuries by the Turks as part of the Ottoman Empire, no Arab or Muslim group has ever possessed an independent sovereign entity on Israel’s soil. Most of the Arabs currently living between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River migrated to the country during the early stages of the Zionist endeavor because jobs had been created by an influx of Jews returning home from exile. At first the Palestinian Jews and Arabs got along as they worked together in building up the country. But Great Britain, for reasons of imperialism, incited the Arabs against the Jewish pioneers, fanning the flames of Pan-Arabism (the forerunner to fundamental Islam). To this day these Arabs are used as tools against Israel by Arab states and Western nations, particularly organizations committed to globalization.

By the time Jewish rebels succeeded in freeing the country from British occupation, the Arabs were fully committed to Israel’s destruction. What had begun as a colonial British policy of “divide and rule” soon evolved into independent Arab rejection of Israel’s national aspirations. In 1948, while attempting to annihilate the re-born Jewish state, the Egyptians conquered Israel’s Gaza Strip as the Jordanian Legion (under British command) tore from Israel Judea and Samaria (more than two decades after Jordan itself had been stolen from the Jews by Winston Churchill and given to the Hashemite tribe as a vassal kingdom). When Jordan illegally annexed its conquest, the only countries to recognize the move were England and Pakistan. Two years later, the British Encyclopedia Britannica renamed Judea and Samaria the “West Bank” in an attempt to legitimize Jordan’s occupation and annexation of Jewish land.

After nineteen years in abnormally truncated borders, Israel was again attacked and risked extermination. But the Israel Defense Forces succeeded in defending Israel from destruction and liberating the heart of its country from foreign rule. Judea, Samaria, and Gaza had at long last been returned to the Jewish people. The Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula were attained. Jerusalem was reunited after nineteen years of heartrending division. But somehow over the years, Arab propagandists (with unlimited budgets from oil revenues) have succeeded in distorting history, morality, and international law. It must be remembered that during World War II, many Arabs in Palestine were avid Nazi collaborators that campaigned for a speedier and more extensive Holocaust. Jerusalem Grand Mufti Haj Amin el Husseini, head of the Berlin based Pan-Arab government in exile, sealed Hungarian Jewry’s fate and foiled the exchange of 10,000 Jewish children. Husseini’s adherents in Palestine planned local exterminations and relentlessly pressured the British administration to refuse haven to Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s inferno. Following the war, Arab states offered asylum to fleeing Nazi war criminals, including the Grand Mufti.

During the Cold War, Arabs veered into open Communist arms, not because of Marxism’s compelling appeal but because the Soviet Union provided weaponry, training and unparalleled propaganda facilities. It was under Soviet tutelage that the Arabs learned to call themselves “Palestinians” and to create a persona of third world freedom fighters struggling against an Israeli occupation. The change in image from Nazi collaborators to a liberation movement helped Arab terrorists gain sympathy from international socialists, progressive journalists, esteemed academics, and human rights activists impressed with the new Moscow contrived underdog appearance. And various interest groups in Europe and the United States have since helped to promote this historically flawed image in order to advance their own globalist agenda (which cannot abide a small Jewish state inconsistently situated on a large and oil-rich Arab continent). Today, Israel does not merely find itself confronted by genocidal Arabs, but also by a hostile world media, global corporations, and most Western powers.

I believe that Israel and the Arabs can live together in peace. But this can only be realized if the international community would stay out of the conflict and allow both sides to settle their differences in a setting free from pressure or intervention. But the Western powers are not likely to back down as there are too many financial and political interests connected to the region. Therefore, both Israel and the Arabs continue to be victimized by the United Nations, greedy corporations, and power hungry governments seeking to destabilize the region in order to reap a profit and expand their spheres of influence. In order to advance the cause of globalization, the Western media depicts Israeli soldiers as oppressors and Jewish settlers as fanatics while people committed to human values accept this portrayal, never bothering to question the standard message. Because most people lead busy lives, the details and history of the Arab-Israeli Conflict are rarely examined with proximity or open-mindedness. I myself was convinced of the official media version for most of my life as one cannot investigate everything seen on television.

After making the effort to investigate the conflict’s history and political reality, I find the behavior of many of my longtime colleagues to be narrow-minded and hypocritical. All of the values that influence the left should dictate support for Israel, a miniscule country struggling to survive in a hostile region with tremendous international pressure currently mounting against it. No activist should feel comfortable voicing an opinion on the Arab-Israeli Conflict until sincerely investigating its history in depth.

Israel today possesses 11,000 square miles while the Arabs enjoy 5,500,000 square miles (not counting three Muslim states including Iran’s 636,000 square miles). If those numbers were reversed and the Jews, possessing five hundred times more land than the Arabs, demanded half of the single Arab state for one of our various ethnic sub-groups (such as the Jews from Ethiopia), not one objective person would take such a demand seriously. If the Arabs genuinely desire to live peacefully under Israeli sovereignty in a Jewish state, they should be welcome to do so in dignity and freedom with full human rights. If they wish to live in an Arab country, they have many to choose from with a variety of governmental systems ranging from modern democracies to Muslim theocracies. As far as the refugee problem is concerned, the world must recognize that the Arab refugees from Israel (numbering about 750,000 in 1948) were intentionally not absorbed as residents of Arab countries, despite the vast lands and wealth at their disposal. Nor were they resettled by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which has actually labored to intensify the situation. Of the 100,000,000 people who became refugees following World War II, this is the only group not absorbed thus far. Instead, they became pawns in the hands of both the globalists and their own leadership in a successful campaign to de-legitimize Israel. The Arab states, with all of their means, should commit themselves to finding a just and humane solution for their people just as Israel did for the near 1,000,000 Jews forced to flee from Arab lands, tripling Israel’s population without any oil money or assistance from foreign countries. Today, with nearly the entire world media and international community amassed against Israel’s right to full borders, self-defense, and the basic necessities of national survival, it is a shame that my fellow activists and veteran champions of human justice do not cry out in support of the Jewish state in her hour of need. One cannot help but wonder if their behavior stems from innocent naïveté or malicious discrimination.

“When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism.”

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968 appearance at Harvard University)